Second Coming

One thing about The Second Coming, though: Steve's buddy Pete (ayup) asks him what it's like inside his head, and he says: "Yeah ... it's like, uh ... I keep on thinking about normal things, you know, like food and telly and stuff, but ... behind all that, there's this ... the whole of creation shoved inside me head! It's like ... it's like opening a door and there's a furnace, burning. The size of it, Pete." The thing is is, what Steve says about what it's like to be God incarnate sounds to me like what it's like to be a human being. Which is, to me, what Kierkegaard is saying about Christianity in The Sickness Unto Death: Christianity is true because it is a revelation of the synthesis that is what it is to be a human being. Aspiring to be Christ-like is aspiring to live as if you are what you essentially are, which is to say, as if you are eternal and as if all things are possible for you while at the same time you are temporal and bound by the necessities of your materiality. Christ is explicitly what we all are implicitly. To which the "atheist" Russell T Davies might say, well, that's (or something like that's) the point! (Although I would be surprised and impressed if he actually meant what Steve says about being God incarnate to be a description of what it is to be human.) We don't need the religion thing anymore, if we ever did, to explain ourselves to ourselves, and now (and for a very long time now) it's just getting in the way by confusing us into keeping on thinking that there is a God that exists in the same way Virginia wonders if Santa does--a God with a discrete subjectivity like our own, capable of intentional effects in the physical world, and that is more or less omnipotent and demands our obedience. So let's kick the bloody thing away already! In this way, you might even see The Second Coming as a good Hegelian take on things--religion runs its course until it's no longer useful for working out our understanding of ourselves in relation to others and to the whole of being; then it's time to take on in literal terms what religion tried to work out figuratively. "The family business closes down." (Less kindly, you might see it as a Nietzschean take on things--not the Nietzschean take where we are the murderers of God, but the one where God dies of embarrassment.) "Science" replaces religion, as it replaces everything else. (At which point it has to be noted that one of the first things you learn when you're learning German philosophy is that the German "Wissenschaft" (but then, also the French "science") has a much broader meaning than the English "science", the latter having become (not always having been, seeing as "scientia" is the Latin translation of the Greek "episteme", and the pursuit of "scientific" knowledge, which is to say genuine knowledge uncontaminated with dogma, for much of the history of the English language has been called "philosophy") so tightly associated with empirical induction (and, all too often in the public mind and in putative attempts to make fields of inquiry outside the empirical sciences "scientific", speculative abduction from the results of empirical induction), such that anglophones are maybe more prone to "scientism" than speakers of other languages, which is extremely unhelpful when it gets down to things like "science vs. religion" debates.) There is a long-running debate in Hegel studies about whether on Hegelian terms art must have exhausted itself; there is just as much a problem about whether religion has exhausted itself (and I can only suppose that the art question has gotten more play because the religion question is in some contexts more touchy and in others more obvious (which is to say, if you're an academic Hegelian, you probably have much stronger personal commitments to art than you do to religion (which reminds me that one of these days I probably ought to read one or two of Charles Taylor's doorstops, God help me))). Anyway, I've always been on the side of the Hegelians who think that Absolute Knowing means recollecting all the particular contributions of all the particular ways of knowing, now with the ability to recognize their particularity and comprehend their place in the understanding of the whole, not kicking them away one by one once we have gotten all we can out of each of them, but on the contrary no longer supposing that any of them are to be kicked away, because they are all essential to an understanding of the whole, and we never actually get to the end of it the process of self-and-other-understanding because there is no end to the folding into each other of the different ways of knowing and what is.

Here's something kind of alarming: near the beginning of The Second Coming I was so busy being distracted by trying to figure out who the woman playing Judith (ayup) is that I missed pretty much everything she said after "Seemed like a good idea at the time ... celebrate the divorce ... " (although it probably also has something to do with the fact that with this thing, as with a lot of Doctor Who (but especially Capaldi), I probably only pick up maybe 3/4 of the words people say and have to hope I'm getting the right gist from context) and so totally failed to notice that she did not mean her divorce from Steve but from some other guy, who Steve says he never liked. So when they kiss it is not a maybe-getting-back-together kiss but a first kiss, and she is not actually sort of denying him on several occasions when she says things about having known him a long time but doesn't say they were married, and the look on her face when the aggressive gay guy in the pub asks him if he's a virgin and he says yes is not either humiliation that the cat's out of the bag about the reason for their divorce (or maybe actually annulment as the case might have been) or confusion about his lying about it.

Currently at Havelock: -10.4 High today: -10.2. Colder at Bancroft than at Alert again this morning.

Was feelin' 'bout half past dead

I've been trying again to get into the habit of keeping up with the weekly lectionary readings, so that I can at least take another shot at weekly homilies during Lent. But today's call for some particular comment. First, as soon as I started into the Old Testament reading yesterday, from 1 Samuel, which is about God's revelation of the endless punishment to be visited on Eli's ancestors for Eli's failure to prevent his sons' blaspheming, I realized that I'm never going to get very far with any of this by trying to deal with these selections out of context. (Because, well, what blaspheming? What's up with Eli, anyway?) So I signed up again for one of biblegateway.com's read-the-bible-in-a-year programs, which I did years ago but abandoned when I got bogged down somewhere around the very detailed instructions about how various kinds of sacrifices are to be performed ... I guess maybe in Deuteronomy [ETA March 25: nope, all the sacrifice stuff is done with before Deuteronomy; I probably quit in Leviticus last time], but anyway not very far in. So, we'll see how that goes this time. One thing about reading the bible from the beginning is, it starts with a pretty, uh, big bang. Lots goes down in the first few pages; two days in and we're already in the middle of the flood. Something I noticed that I don't know how I never noticed before: part of what God says to Cain in Genesis 4:7, which I've paid so much attention to over the years--"If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him"--is a very close echo of what God says to Eve in Genesis 3:16: "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." (I am actually kicking the King James habit, but the Cain bit is too good to modernize.) I've discovered that there has been a lot of debate since the mid-'70s over whether the "desire" in Gen. 3:16 is a desire to dominate, as the desire in 4:7 seems to be; folks who argue it isn't call on Song of Solomon 7:10, which is apparently the only other place the Hebrew word appears, and in which it plainly means one person's desire for another. (Apparently some people, including John Calvin, have held that the "his" in Gen. 4:7 refers to Abel rather than to sin--an interpretation precluded, e.g., by the NRSV, which has "its" instead of "his". Which, well, I dunno.) According to Strong's, the etymological sense of the Hebrew word is a running-toward. Anyway, it is clearly not an accident that the formula from 3:16 is repeated in 4:7, but I'm not sure what to make of it.

The seven days of creation got me wondering about the history of the seven-day week. (The outlandish ages given for people in Genesis 5 got me wondering what that could possibly be about, but I have no idea.) Apparently its invention was not unique to the ancient Hebrews, since other cultures (including the Babylonians, from whom the Hebrews apparently may have picked up the idea) also decided to divide the 28-day lunar month into four parts. (I have not investigated what they did about the fact that the lunar month--which is to say, the synodic month--is about a day and a half longer than twenty-eight days.) But e.g. the Romans had a nine-day week prior to its replacement with the seven-day week that the Christians inherited from the Jews. In connection with this I also learned that the 28-day lunar month was not fully formally replaced with the calendar month in British legal definitions of "month" until 1978.

Something else I learned today that may be either old news, amazing, or of no interest at all: the B-52 bomber, which was first purchased by the US Air Force in 1946 and was last significantly redesigned in 1961, is expected to be in service until the 2040s; the plane that is projected to mainly replace it doesn't actually exist yet.

Also I learned today that there is no particular sense to Bushmill's being "Protestant whiskey" except that it is produced in what is now Northern Ireland, but more on The Wire later.

Anyway: context notwithstanding, there are a couple of things that stand out to me in today's lectionary reading from 1 Samuel: first, when God is going to call Samuel for the third time (after Samuel had mistaken God's voice for Eli's the first two times), the text says that "the Lord came and stood there": at this point in the Hebrew bible, God is a guy who can be standing there. Which reminds me that after God calls Cain out for killing Abel, Cain travels away from God's presence, which reminds me of another thing I noticed very early in Genesis that I had never noticed before, and which I now discover I had never noticed before because the KJV hides it: Genesis 2:15, in the NRSV's rendering, says that "the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it"; contrary to some conventional wisdom that I have been influenced by, it is not the case that there is no work to be done in Eden. The KJV, I'd guess possibly due to the influence of that conventional wisdom, has "dress" instead of "till"; it appears that according to Strong's, that's one of two instances in which the KJV has "dress" for a Hebrew word for which it has "till" dozens of times.

Second (!): this story in 1 Samuel is another case of God being a narcissistic psychopath.

What stands out to me about the lectionary's Psalm selection for today (139:1-6, 13-18) is the apparent difference between its God and the God in 1 Samuel and early on in the Hebrew bible generally: the psalmist's God is very much on the way toward the Christian God and the God of the philosophers, a God who is in charge of the minutest detail of everything and to whom everyone is completely transparent--a God who would have no need to test Abraham (or, for that matter, Jonah--the psalmist's God is what God pretends he is to Jonah at the end, but has shown himself not to be by what he has done to Jonah).

And then with today's selection from Paul's epistles, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, I'm liking Paul better already. Here Paul's on against fornicating and whoring, not because the body is of no importance and a distraction from the spiritual, but because the body is of the utmost importance--"every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself"--because "your bodies are members of Christ" and "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you". This is a Paul I can work with.

And finally there's today's selection from the gospels, John 1:43-51, in which Philip tells Nathanael to come meet Jesus the son of Joseph of from Nazareth, and Nathanael replies, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Which I'm sure was funnier at the time but is still pretty funny if'n y'ask me.

Currently at Havelock: -16.8.